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Not too much to report on the family history front over the last couple of weeks. We’ve been recovering after Easter and all the pigging out in bright week. You can say what you like about Easter eggs — I like mine fried, with bacon. Actually our Bright Week breakfast was the BEST breakfast: Bacon, Egg, Sausage and Tomato.

Taking some people back home after the Easter vigil at about 3:30 AM we fell into a hole in the road, because another car would choose just that place to come down the hill with its lights on bright, and the streetlights were out too. So I’ve had an enforced stay at home after buying two new tyres and waiting for the wheel to be repaired.

And then yesterday the Internet went off again. No, not again, we said. We increased out limit from 2 Gig to 3 Gig, but it still ran out. So while waiting to get that sorted out, I spent less time on line and played around with askSam for Windows, the program I use to record a lot of information in the archives etc. I used to use askSam for DOS — still do, in fact, and find it easier to use. But the new Windows printers don’t print from DOS programs, so you have to go through all, the schlep of outputting to a file, and then pulling it into a Windows program like Wordpad to print. So I thought I’d play with the Windows version, and it’s producing some quite decent reports now. But, unlike the DOS version, it’s not so easy to just pull the output into e-mail and send it to family members around the world. But if I keep playing with it, maybe I’ll find out. I’ve been using the DOS version for 16 years now, and it’s still hard to beat for sheer usefulness. I use it more than any other program.

And then we did get an e-mail from Val’s cousin Peter Decker, which was very encouraging. We visited his father 30 years ago, just after we got married, and pumped him for information about the family, but then he moved away and we lost touch, and so having his son contact us was a nice surprise.

Now our internet connection is working again, so I’m writing this after a couple of disconnected days, but looking at the usage I suspect that it may be caused by spyware or something like that. The uploads are tracking the downloads, which makes it look as though someone is using one of our computers to disseminate spam or something, so we’re updating our antivirus and anti spyware programs.